"Krypter, krypter. Dusk One One to Godfather Actual!" Sol yelled into the signal booster still strapped to his comm tech's huddled back, "Advance wave is on site! Antarians are in some real karking poodoo down here, we're drowning in bucketheads! How copy?!"
Hostile shelling of the Silver Jedi outpost had reduced most of the trees around its perimeter to splinters, but it was early enough in the fight that there were still some spots of burning forest that could serve as basic cover. Captain Stazi was dug in alongside his comm trooper behind the stump of what must have once been a majestic elder spruce. Not that it made much of a difference, there were stormtroopers on both their flanks and it was all the duros could do to keep plugging away at anything with a clear line of sight on their position.
"Krypter, krypter! Godfather this is Dusk One One do you read?!" he repeated as loud as his lungs would allow, yanking the fleeing trooper back down by his signal booster, "Situation on the ground is fething karked!"
"This is Rogue Five - who needs aerial assistance on the ground?" a feminine drawl crackled through the static of Sith jammers,
"Guns are hot and ready. Give me a location."
"Dusk One One to Rogue Five!" the duros hollered back at [member="Loske Matson"], glancing around to confirm his previous assessment, "Broken saber! Position overrun! Lock onto my signal and trust the kriffing Force!"
Sol and his fellow trooper were fighting back to back now. He was a young klatooinian kid, chosen for comm duties because of his background in tech salvage. Hell of a first jump, but hadn't Sol's been the same? Major Sunfell liked to joke that her captain was too stubborn headed to die, and maybe there was some truth to that. But the longer he spent in combat zones, the more Sol was beginning to believe there wasn't much truth to anything at all. No fate or destiny, just some kind of fethed up cosmic sabacc game.
"Jade!" switching to Twilight's internal channel, he tried to catch the attention of their
queen of air and darkness as it were, "Tell em to bring in the other knights!"
If it weren't for [member="Romi Jade"], a lot less troopers in his platoon would be alive right now. It was always a ferocious scrum, when the enemy finally realized mobile infantry had dropped on their position. Most of their early focus was on the hated Jedi in their midst which gave Sol and his men the time they needed to find cover and even establish some crude enfilades. Now she was just barely visible through the smoke and haze, even though she couldn't have been more than ten or fifteen meters from his position. Her lightsaber burned brightly enough, however.
Squinting through the fog of war, the captain's attention drifted up to the heavens. He was the first to notice strange crimson stars twinkling far above, and Stazi worked out the terrible implications of such a phenomenon at roughly the same time the first impact hit. Up close and personal, a turbolaser strike on the surface was a truly terrifying thing to behold. The smell of ozone penetrated his warplate and his visor tinted automatically before he was blinded by the sight of it. Then nothing but a vast smoking crater where once there had been Alliance shock troopers, Antarian Rangers, and hostile bucketheads alike.
"They're bombarding their own position," Sol mumbled in awe, the noise around him was so deafening that he couldn't even hear himself speak.
A nearby artillery blast sent him flying backwards, and when he got to his feet the only sound was a dull ringing.
"Take cover! Find a foxhole!" the duros yelled anyway, trusting that just because he couldn't hear that others might not be so unlucky, "Find a foxhole! Get down!"
[member="Amon Vizsla"] | [member="Ador Horn"] | [member="Coren Starchaser"] | [member="Kahne Porte"] | [member="Joza Perl"] | et al.
Through Atmosphere
